The film did not age well at all. Very much a product of early 80’s art cinema.
Well, I suppose it comes to the point of asking, “What were you expecting from such a film?” I mean, if one has gone through Malle’s filmography or is even superficially aware of his tendencies, surely they couldn’t be surprised at how this film turned out to be.
Sure, I see where detractors of the film are coming from “out of context,” but why should we regard it out of context, like some leprous beggar, and look at it for what it actually was? Perhaps forcing one’s post-modernistic self upon history accumulates brownie points at the university, but in reality, it’s just a quaint trend more accustomed to “contrarianism” than actual criticism.
Perhaps to Robert, the film reinforces his own views ad nauseum (that’s what I got out of it at least), but why regard the film as reinforcing ANY view? The point of the film is not to convince the audience of one side or the other, but to suggest to the audience that both sides are equally (in their own way) valid. This led to the comment by the two actors (which I previously mentioned) that they could switch dialogue and still create a meaningful film. THIS is the point, not the flagrant philandering of some cause or other.
just rewatched this.
the conservation is thoroughly engaging and the lack of flashbacks or cutaways during the storys is great because you must visualize everything yourself, like a good book.
I’m just not connecting with this one. Thought the conversations were boring and ridiculous, hated the characters, didn’t like the static cinematography…. not getting into any of it. Guess I’m in the minority opinion?
This is such an immensely important film to me, providing guidance and delight many times over. I think the Criterion extras, particularly the interview with Andre are helpful in understanding the use of the film. Andre says something about how the movie is as cinematic and epic as “Lawrence of Arabia” only instead of going to the Sahara and filming Andre and the Monk, or going to Poland with Grotowski, Andre simply tells the story, and the image is reconstructed in the viewers mind. This is really the way much of theatre and poetry, spoken word forms, work, and certainly serves Andre and Wally’s purported reason for making the film, to “wake people up”, to reactivate them from the sleep that modern civilization induces.The movie, like theatre and poetry, does not reward the viewer unless the viewer actively engages with it. This makes the viewer an active participant rather than a passive observer. If we don’t think and imagine Andre’s stories in our own minds the movie is literally just two rather strange looking New York Intellectuals talking for two hours.
People expect a movie, and perhaps many things in our “culture” to be a kind of conveyance for emotion and spectacle. You go to a movie to “get your money’s worth”. You want to be wowed, to see something you’ve never seen before, to see something big. As a result, much of our cinema, and increasingly more of our entertainment and life in general, is sensational. As they say in the movie, perhaps it’s not great that our films are all reinforcing people’s notions that the world is a horrible place. Movies bandy about murder and death and lewd sex like loose change. These things that should be of great consequence become of no consequence, and our stories become “not of the heart, but of the glands,” as Faulkner said. These things we see on screen are not human beings, they are cadavers-in-waiting, or fetishes. My Dinner With Andre tries to be a film about simple, real feeling between two people. I think this is a most dignified and honorable use for the cinema.
Why make this a movie and not a stage play? It could probably be either, and in fact was staged by Andre and Wally at the Royal Court Theatre in London. I think it’s important that it’s a movie for a few reasons. One, it’s an incredibly rebellious daring feat, a kind of “anti-movie,” where the story is construed in the exact opposite manner of the golden rule of Hollywood screenwriting “Show, Don’t Tell”. The movie is partly about how nobody sees each other anymore, how nobody looks and sees, we are lost in sleep, and literally what the film is doing is forcing you to look quite closely at two human beings interacting with each other, our attention is held at their faces, and little else. Over the course of the two hours, perhaps we begin to tune in more closely to this perception.
Throughout the film, we are constantly switching back between our mind’s eye and the image in front of us, we are constantly moving from the “dream world” of the imagination, to the “real world” of the film. Of course, the movie is not the real world, but I think, like Wally, we are meant to come back to the real world from the film with an altered consciousness, a renewed, heightened awareness to tired, familiar surroundings. Another one of the points made in the film is that human beings are performing all the time, perhaps much better than the actors on the stage. That it’s a film and not a play affords Wally and Andre the opportunity to “perform” as themselves, or fictional versions of themselves, a kind of fun meta capability that wouldn’t have been there in subsequent productions of the play.
I could go on and on about this film I love it so much. I think about it everyday. It would be very interesting to see a staged version of it with Wally and Andre, I think somehow Andre’s stories would seem more real. On screen, people tend to become myths, dream-figures, or perhaps even “ghosts” as Andre says. To see Andre in person speaking of how he was buried alive would be quite a striking thing indeed. On film, it might as well be Christopher Robin talking to Winnie-The-Pooh as someone suggested Andre and Wally reminds them of. I’m sure this was an intended aspect of the work, and it would be interesting to explore what making Andre and Wally into movie characters, alongside Dirty Harry and Mickey Mouse, does to their effect and relevance as human beings.
I think the film raises all kinds of questions about the nature of film vs. theatre, reality vs. dream, life vs. death, waking vs. sleep. If it is “self-defense” as someone stated earlier, I think that is only natural. In this immense, modern totalitarian world government based on money (to paraphrase Andre) there is plenty to be afraid of. The film, ultimately is not about being afraid, but of conquering that fear through human connection. More than anything, it is a story of two friends reconnecting, and in a world of increasing alienation and fragmentation via what are mostly artificial social and economic circumstances, perhaps reknitting the relationships between us, face-to-face, conversationally, is the best thing we can do.
I just recently saw this movie and found it stimulating and delighful. Andre’s descriptive conversation about how he had spent the last 5 years really caught my interest, and then Wally’s counter to Andre’s concept of what is real for him made it even more enjoyable. And who has conversations like this, I don’t believe you could ever see this kind of dialogue in any interview. It’s a conversation that begins with the fact that both men are friends and have a genuine affection for each others talents. I won’t say they are the best of friends but both respect each others work, ideas and love for the theater. I found it sad that in Andre’s search for something real to stimulate him he has neglected his family, to the point where he ends the night by asking where is that son? And Wally ends his by reflecting on the reality of his own life through all the places he goes by which bring back memories and a sense of fulfillment and belonging and finding it easy to go home to Debbie and relating his conversation with Andre.
amazing news from dark horizons:
Nearly two decades after they shook up the art house cinema world with cult classics “My Dinner With André” and “Vanya on 42nd Street”, creators Wallace Shawn and André Gregory are re-teaming for a new project which Jonathan Demme (“The Silence of the Lambs,” “Rachel Getting Married”) will direct reports The New York Times.
The sub-$1 million film is being described as an adaptation of Ibsen’s “Master Builder", the story of an architect (Shawn) increasingly caught up in his own fantasies. Julie Hagerty will star as his wife, Lisa Joyce as his young admirer and Gregory as an aging employee of the architect.
Both Shawn or Gregory had issues with the original translation and went back to the original Norwegian text. With the help of an Ibsen scholar, Shawn carefully translated the play himself and made “cuts and changes of emphasis and interpretation”.
The film will be shot in just a few days sometime this Spring at New York’s East Village art club ‘The Pen and Brush’. Louis Malle helmed the pair’s previous two films, he passed away in 1995.
Robert trapped in nowhere
I recently watched this film (well a good 60 minutes of it before throwing in the towel). As you’d expect I very much disliked it. I also sense it’s the kind of film where those who dislike it can be easily or quickly denounced as Michael Bay-lovin’ mooks who don’t get philosophy. I’m glad this conversation seems to be eschewing that mindset.
I don’t begrudge it it’s premise. I think a film about a conversation could work fine. But to me it was not engaging. I was in fact reminded much of Waking Life, which aside from being visually inventive was also a bore. For philosophy, I’ll take a semi-impenetrable Tarkovsky film any day. I prefer a movie that asks me to engage with it. My Dinner With Andre (and Waking Life even more) asked me to sit back while it did the thinking for me.
And lastly, I despise movies that make me sound like anything like the good liberal I’m proud to be. But someone philosophizing about how most people just don’t get it while they, in fact totally get it comes off less like philosophy and more like a defense mechanism.